Robopocalypse
Ratings82
Average rating3.5
this review seems to justify
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/139051483?book_show_action=true
It starts with the ending, has some pretty good horror elements and descriptions, anticlimactic ending. The concept is good but at times the characters were a little flat.
Similar enough to “World War Z” that you could call it “World War R”. In spite of that, it's a pretty fantastic book. I had to force myself to put it down and go to sleep one night and I wanted to get through it so much that I blew part of a work day finishing the last 25%.
It's told as a series of reports on events that led up to the conclusion of a great fight between humans and robots. You kind of have to remember these as a person described in chapter 3 might show up in important ways in chapter 15.
It was a little irritating that, after telling the story of that chapter, the narrator would comment that, later, this event would lead to this person saving all mankind or something.
Some of the stories, especially the airplane story, were quite terrifying.
All in all, I thought it was well thought out and there were several surprising twists.
I found it very similar to World War Z in its structure and execution of the shory.
Absolutely loved this futuristic robot takeover novel. Lots of high paced action and just aim fun to read. Can't wait to read Amped.
I think Io9.com put it best when they called it the summer's best movie - in book form. Daniel H. Wilson thanks Dreamworks in the Acknowledgements and IMDB already has Steven Spielberg attached to the project. You can't help but cast the protagonists in your mind and it reads like a script. Therein lies my biggest complaint. Daniel H. Wilson writes in the first person as each chapter jets you around the world from protagonist to protagonist. Unfortunately the 12 year old speaks in the same writerly tones as the construction grunt or the aged Japanese tinkerer.
Still it's a compelling read and only the end lacks the theatric oomph I was hoping for, finishing with a whimper instead of a bang. Still you can't help but see each action packed set piece laid out in cinematic form and drool at the prospect of this being turned into a movie. This could be a unique case where the movie will surpass the source material.
This is my 2nd time reading this after reading it as a teen, and it's... interesting, for sure. It's as emotionally arresting as I remember (though that's definitely tinged with nostalgia goggles), and it's also less... racially sensitive than I remember, certainly. The Indigenous characters are clearly well-researched in the sense that Wilson looked up the Osage nation, but otherwise read like Noble S/v/ges mixed with cowboys in a way I found good-faith unsettling. The older Japanese man, Nomura... well, the orientalism in this is settled and comfortable in its nonsense. I can look past it because so little time is spent with Nomura and ultimately it seems like Wilson forgets by the latter third of the novel that his Indigenous characters are Indigenous, but it definitely is different than I remember. And the work camps... I did not remember those at all, just to level.
Ultimately, this is World War Z with robots and with significantly less awful HIV-metaphors, but significantly more weird Holocaust-metaphors, so YMMV.
Simply. I found the way the story was told to be a little odd, but really helped to paint a good picture.
I found myself often wondering about the events while not even reading the book. That to me says I enjoyed it (and was a little weirded out as the events were very plausible from my point of view)
DNF at 24%
I got bored reading so many disconnected stories leading up to the robot apocalypse/war. Just get to it already. The individual stories are interesting, but how freaking many are there and I'm only 24% in? Not fast paced enough to keep me hooked.
Well, this is just sad because this book had so much potential. I saw this book was available on my Kindle as an audiobook, and so I decided to broaden my horizons a bit, and decided to read what was a hardcore scifi novel. Now, at first glance, this may seem like a stereotypical robots take over the world scenario, and, I have to admit, it is, but I was optimistic that this novel would be good based on two things. One, the author has a Ph.D in robotics, and it was told somewhat oddly in a series of journals, so it should be filled with various interesting ways that Robots take over the world, right? Yes...but that is part of the problem.
You see, for all the good that Wilson does for the different ways that we see the robots go haywire, in the end, the writing is just boring, and never really managed to grab my attention. We would go from a seemingly interesting story about a military robot that can go from harmless to killer in a second, to a domestic service bot that...goes from harmless to killer in about a second. Many of the basic premises seemed to be repeated with variation in how who they were told to. Also, another sin is that the writing just isn't that good. We expect that the writing would changed with each character in some way, since we typically see it from various different points of view- a 14 year old girl writing about what happened when she was ten, a store clerk speaking to a detective, a military translator speaking at a senate committee- but they all begin to sound the same, and it gets on my nerves. This book started off really strong, with a soldier who kills little bots with a freakin' flame thrower, writing how he discovered a robot that recorded the Robot uprising from the start to the finish. This opening scene is filled with good action that one hardly sees again, or, at least, does not see enough of. This is sad, because it should be interesting but the mediocre writing, coupled with the narrator not sounding like he was good enough for this, made me want to put it down and not pick it up again.
It is for these reasons that I give it a two out of five. While there are some good elements here beneath the surface there just wasn't enough to hold my attention.